Build Your Own Real Estate Portal

This video demo features industry experts in marketing, APIs, and website development to give you everything you need to know to build your own real estate portal.

Some of the key parts of a real estate portal include Automated Valuation Models or AVMs, Neighborhood Pages, Property Landing Pages and Market Overviews. This demo will walk you through how to build and implement each of these features.

The Onboard Informatics Developer Platform gives you access to everything you might need to get started with the APIs. This site was built to offer easy access to our data dictionaries, documentation and sources for the APIs. You can sign up for a free 90-day trial today and get started today.

Our panel features Erin Gilbert, VP of Marketing at Onboard Informatics, Kevin Mattice, our Senior Product Manager at Onboard, and Seth Siegler, founder and CEO of Hoverboard Labs. This panel has years of experience in generating seller leads with Automated Valuation Models, using APIs and building these types of solutions. With Onboard's API, you can create your own real estate portal to generate your own real estate leads, improve SEO and offer local area expertise anywhere in the country.

1. AVM

An AVM (Automated Valuation Model) is used to generate seller leads, and offer more control over the sale. Consumers selling their home looking for an agent, but home buyers are just looking for properties. When you have a seller, you're more likely to get your commission, and sellers have more loyalty than a buyer customer. This makes them really valuable, as they can also offer great referrals in the future.

"Approximately 30% of people who submit a lead from that address end up selling their home within a year These are really high-quality prospects." - Tapan Bhat [Move's Chief Product Officer]

These AVMs usually offer an estimated home value, basic property information, and comparable homes nearby. An online estimate is not intended to be a replacement for an in-person home inspection, but it's a great way for real estate agents or brokers to start a conversation. Sometimes these estimates are hidden behind a lead capture form, where you have to put in your information before seeing the estimate. You might want to consider adding this to capture as many seller leads as possible.

If you're interested in building your own, Kevin demonstrates some sample API calls in our webinar that you could use to offer estimated home values and comparable homes. If you're not a developer and you're interested in purchasing an AVM, take a look at myAVM from Onboard.

2. Neighborhood Pages

These pages offer local area information on neighborhoods, cities or even zip codes.

"Buyers who look online for properties visit 10 homes over 10 weeks before making a purchase. Buyers who go straight to a real estate agent and did not look online visit four homes over only four weeks before they made their purchase, indicating that they likely know the neighborhoood already where they want to buy." - National Association of REALTORS®

This means that online buyers often want to research neighborhoods in addition to properties. If they don't know what neighborhood they want to live in, they'll start by exploring potential neighborhoods that interest them and then narrow their search to properties available in that area. Having neighborhood pages is valuable content for people just starting their search. Websites that use Onboard Informatics' data can offer more robust demographic information on their websites, like drive times and additional listings.

3. Property Landing Pages

By adding Property Landing Pages to your website, you will be able to show properties that are on the market, as well as off market. These pages include photos, market trends, basic property information and a lead capture form (as should every page). You can build out the pages however you like, but by adding these to your listings, you have a page for every property in your community, expanding your site exponentially.

Businesses with 40+ landing pages get 12x more leads per year than those with less than five landing pages. - Study by Zillow

How does this impact your business? More landing pages with relevant content means that Google will pick up your web pages more, which leads to a higher rank on the results page, which means more people will find you, which means more traffic, more opportunities for leads and more sales for you.

4. Market Overview

This combines the benefits of unique landing pages (SEO) with more content for sellers (like AVMs). This kind of page will offer information that is valuable to home sellers. You can show the latest sales trends and whether the market is "hot" or not. This is a great solution to attract or engage home sellers. This feature is similar to a conversation a consumer would have in-person with a real estate agent, where you can share your local expertise.

Looking for more information? Contact us for help on getting started with the Developer Platform at [email protected]. Or if you're interested in purchasing our AVM, reach out to [email protected].

To view the original article, visit the Onboard Informatics blog.